Open Research Online

Every year, to help raise awareness of the benefits of Open Access in scholarship and research, the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) organise Open Access Week. A global event, and now in its 4th year, Open Access Week is due to take place this month, starting Monday the 18th of October.

To mark the occasion, Library Services and Research School are running a competition for the best ORO success stories. Has depositing your work in ORO helped raise your research profile, or perhaps that of your research group? Do you have evidence that it has helped you gain extra citations? By opening up access to your research through ORO has it helped generate impact beyond academia?

Send in your stories (one or two paragraphs is fine) to lib-oro-team@open.ac.uk. I will summarise the best entries in a post on this blog, and a £20 Amazon voucher will be awarded to the overall winner. The deadline for entries is the end of Open Access Week: Sunday the 24th of October. Good luck!

Having just spent an hour putting together a presentation on the role our repository can play in maximising citations, and thus preparing for the inevitable sceptisism one will always receive when talking to some people on such matters, I was reminded of an ongoing debate I have with (of all people) my father-in-law, on the issue of climate change.

Not one to pick too many debates with my father-in-law, for obvious reasons, I’m afraid I do tend to stand firm when it comes to climate change, and I frequently find myself (metaphorically-speaking) bashing my head against the wall in many a frustrating exchange. Without getting into the nitty-gritty (and please, I don’t want this post itself to turn into a debate on climate change!), my point is essentially that, even if global warming to a damaging degree doesn’t happen in the next century or two, if there is a chance that it will, and measures can be taken to mitigate it, why not do so anyway? If you were to be told there is a 70% chance your house will burn down tomorrow, but if you take this measure to prevent it then it probably won’t happen, you are more than likely going to take that measure.

And so on to the parallels with open access (OA), in particular the OA citation advantage…

For those unfamiliar with this, based on the (quite reasonable) assumptions that 1) a proportion of researchers do not have access to all published research that is relevant to them; 2) the problem would be otherwise addressed by unavailable research being freely available online; and 3) some of these articles would be relevant, and thus citable… the expectation is that published research made openly accessible online will carry a “citation advantage”. In other words, by publishing or archiving research in an open access manner, the chances of one’s work being cited improves.

Unsurprisingly, there have been many studies which have attempted to investigate this notion, many of which have provided convincing evidence for its existence. However, also unsurprisingly, there are a lot of people who argue serious flaws in concluding that it is OA that is causing the apparent advantage. I’m not going to go into all the details in this post, but for those interested in following up the debate, a good starting point would be Alma Swan’s recent summary of reported studies on the OA citation advantage.

For the purposes of this post, however, the point I want to make is where the parallels with the climate change debate come in. Even if the advantage of doing something contains an element of doubt, if there is no disadvantage to not doing it, why not do it anyway? If there is even the slightest chance that you could become better cited or achieve broader impact for your research through OA, why not just do it? As I always like to remind people, it takes little over one minute to deposit a journal article in ORO using the DOI (for proof see our screencast of this being done, and at a rather conservative pace, it has to be said!), and certainly no more than two or three minutes if you have to enter the details manually, so don’t come back with the argument that you don’t have the time!

As a closing thought, if we think of academic journals in the OA debate as oil in the climate change debate, we are only going to have less and less access to them as time goes on. Academic libraries cannot afford to subscribe to them all, and that is only going to get worse. In the same way that in 50, 100, 150 years time (whatever it may be) we will have no oil-based fuel to put in our cars, in 10, 15, 20 years time you may be even less likely than you are now to reach your desired audience by simply relying on the subscription base of a given journal. Rather than waiting to see if this happens, why not do something about it now?

One of the many advantages of ORO is the role it can play in raising the profile of OU research. By this, I don’t only mean at the University scale, but also at Faculty, Department, Centre, Research Group, and individual researcher level too.

As such, we have had many people come to us and ask if we can create a publications feed for their website. The answer is yes, it can be done in a variety of ways, but up until now we’ve tended to work with people making these requests on a case-by-case basis, which of course can be very time-consuming.

However, now (as of today), it is a lot easier for you (or your website editor) to embed a publications feed, driven by ORO, without much (if any) involvement by us! From any set of search results, or indeed from any browse page within ORO, you will now see “Embed as feed” towards the top of the page with a “+” sign next to it. Clicking on the “+” will reveal a string of code which, when copied into the code for your site, will create a publications feed based on that page.

The standard feed this code creates is the ten most recent publications, in descending order by year of publication. I would suggest this, together with a link through to ORO to view all publications matching the criteria, would be a very nice feature on any OU-research-based website. And remember to make use of ORO’s Short URL service when linking through to a set of publications, particularly if it has been generated from a search.

Clearly, some people may want feeds ordered or styled in different ways, and in these cases you may still need to come back to us for help. However, we are addressing that too! Pretty soon we will also be rolling out a feed API for ORO, allowing developers to play around with the raw data, perhaps changing the citation style, the order of results, the number of results displayed, and so on. Also on the cards is some new functionality to allow individual articles to be tagged with Research Group information, thus enabling feeds for Research Groups to be created off the back of that information. Keep any eye on the blog for further announcements!

Finally, to help people understand how to use this new functionality, we’ve produced a short screencast demo which can be found in a new “Video Tutorials” section of the ORO help pages. More screencasts demonstrating other features of ORO will be added over the coming weeks and months!

The most downloaded item from ORO in February 2010 was CREET’s Nigel Bennett and coauthors’ 2003 report on distributed leadership. Literature reviews are often popular, but in receiving more than one unique download per day that month, this article is clearly particularly well valued by its audience.

Another article worth mentioning is the joint IET and OUBS paper by Jones et al. (2010) on “net generation” students encountering e-learning in higher education. This very-recently-published-paper was deposited in ORO in the second week of February, and yet still ended up the sixth most downloaded article that month.

For the complete Top 15, click here: ORO downloads 02_2010a.

As most people will know, up until now, I have regularly produced two monthly top 10 lists for ORO: the most-viewed journal articles and the most-viewed non-journal articles. However, I’ve always preferred the idea of providing figures on full-text downloads rather than visits, as I think this has the potential to provide people with much more meaningful information.

A visit to a particular article may well be someone genuinely interested in reading and using that bit of research, but, equally, it could be someone who has just performed a Google search, clicked through to the item on ORO, looked at it for a second, and then moved on because they realised it was not what they were after. A download, however, probably means a lot more than that. If that same someone has clicked through to the item on ORO, looked at the title and abstract, and then taken the decision to download the full text, I would say there is a fair chance they have made the decision that that document is going to be useful to them in some way. And if that someone is an academic carrying out a literature search for their next paper, it may even translate into citations for you!

Anyway, I’m not going to go into the reasons why I haven’t reported on downloads up until now, simply because they are boring technical things that no one will be interested in. However, suffice it to say we have now gotten over these boring technical problems and have been merrily recording full text downloads since the 15th of December 2009. So, without further ado, here is the first top 15 (no longer top 10!) downloads for January 2010: ORO downloads 01_2010a.

When I’m out and about advocating the use of ORO to broaden access to your research, one common question I get asked is “how do people find stuff in ORO?” Well, it’s true to say that almost no one, when carrying out a literature search, will think to themselves “I know, let’s visit the OU’s repository and have a nose around for anything useful!” Instead, the vast majority (79% in November, in fact) discover your research deposited in ORO having first turned to a search engine. And there are no surprises for guessing the most popular one… yes, 70% of that 79% came from Google. This all compares to around 17% coming from referring sites, and 5% being direct traffic.

This is all very well, but I’m sure you’re interested in a bit more detail than that. For instance, what keywords are people using? What countries do visitors come from? What cities do they come from? What universities do they come from?! Well, for the month of November 2009, here’s a summary for you:

Top 10 key words/phrases used in Google, directing people to ORO:

1. “human computer interaction”
2. ageism
3. photography
4. physiotherapy
5. author = Preece; title = interaction design: beyond human-computer interaction
6. Kaplinsky
7. ORO
8. anthropology
9. family sex
10. author = Gill; title = gender and media

So, congratulations to Professor Raphael Kaplinsky for being the most-searched-for OU author in November! And clearly, there are other specific OU publications that peope are looking for. However, beyond that, the above list demonstrates how pretty simple key words or phrases can lead people to your research. Indeed, if we drill down to the next ten key words/phrases, we get things like “mossaic approach”, “fraser guidelines”, and “magnesium shot peening”. It is of course no coincidence that papers relating to these subject areas also appeared in November’s top 10 most-viewed items on ORO.

So, onto some more juicy information! Here are some top 5 lists for which universities visitors in November came from:

UK (excluding the OU):

1. University of Cambridge (92 visits)
2. University of Oxford (82 visits)
3. University of Manchester (73 visits)
4. University of Southampton (72 visits)
5. University of Nottingham (58 visits)

Western Europe:

1. University of Potsdam, Germany (24 visits)
2. University of Amsterdam, Netherands (17 visits)
3. Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (15 visits)
4. University of Vienna, Austria (15 visits)
5. Erasmus University, Rotterdam (13 visits)

North America:

1. University of British Columbia, Canada (21 visits)
2. McGill University, Canada (18 visits)
3. University of Minnesota, USA (18 visits)
4. University of Toronto, Canada (18 visits)
5. Indiana University, USA (15 visits)

Perhaps even more interesting is to look at an individual paper. For instance, let’s take the most-viewed journal article on ORO in November, Dr Marc Cornock’s paper “Fraser guidelines or Gillick competence?”, published in the Journal of Children’s and Young People’s Nursing in 2007. Since being deposited in ORO on the 1st of May 2009, this paper has had almost 1000 unique views from 328 different network locations. Among those, we can see that Dr Cornock’s paper has attracted interest from a variety of sources. For example, Penwith College, in Cornwall; Tower Hamlets NHS Primary Care Trust; Brighton & Hove Unitary Authority; Leeds Metropolitan University; Southampton City Council… to name but a few of the most common.

Obviously, looking into this much detail takes time and resources, but if anyone is interested in finding out more about who is accessing their work through ORO, do please get in touch. I’ll see what I can do!

I’d just like to take a moment to showcase a recent ORO entry, which I think demonstrates how a repository record can actually look reasonably attractive, and offer a bit more other than just a single-point entry for one particular article, or item.

A number of OU authors have recently been involved (as editors and contributors) in the publication of a book entitled “Environment, Development, and Sustainability: Perspectives and cases from around the world”. The main entry in ORO for this book can be found here: http://oro.open.ac.uk/19088.

As you will see when you visit the page in ORO, in the “Extra Information” field we have provided links through to the individual book chapter records in ORO by OU contributors. You will also see that three of the links indicate that the full text is openly available (we received permission from Oxford University Press to do this). If you then choose one of the chapters to click through to, you will see that there is also a link back to the main book entry. Thus, if someone arrives at one of the individual chapters (say via a Google search), they can then very easily find out more information about the book as a whole.

I would certainly encourage OU academics to consider cross-linking in this way. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a book and its associated chapters; it could, for example, be a series of related journal articles. If anyone is interested in doing this, do please get in touch.

On a related note, we are planning to make author names clickable in the near future, so that if someone comes across a particular article by an OU author, they can, with one click, see a list of all publications on ORO by that same author. Watch this space!

There is no doubt that a very good way to embed an institutional repository across campus is to encourage people to create publication feeds from it. For example, in indivudal staff pages, research group pages, or (as we are doing here at the OU at the moment) in an online research degrees prospectus. Not only does this help demonstrate to Faculty that the repository has uses, it also encourages academics to keep depositing their publications, so as to not adversely affect the content of the feeds created.

The most commonly used feed system is of course RSS, and all repository software comes RSS-ready, out-of-the-box. But exactly how useful are RSS feeds for the type of content a research repository contains? I would argue not very, and this has long been a concern of mine. The reason is, like RSS, really simple: standard RSS feeds do not deliver repository content in an order which is useful for Faculty pages, i.e. by date of publication.

I mentioned above that we are embedding publication feeds from ORO in our soon-to-be-launched online research degrees prospectus. When I was approached about this I explained that RSS feeds would be very easy to implement, but that they would deliver the most recent content added to the repository, and not necessarily the most recently published items. Nevertheless, it was decided to go ahead, mainly due to tight time schedules. I suspected that when the prospectus went out for approval to Faculties this decision would come back to bite, and I was right.

RSS feeds provide a reflection of recent activity in the repository, and not necessarily recently-published research. We are in the process of uploading a selection of exemplar (but old) PhD theses at the moment, so naturally these appeared in the RSS feeds for the prospectus. Also, in another area, one particular person had been spending some time depositing a large number of his publications, and so the RSS feed consisted only of that person’s work.

Of course, there are solutions. It is quite easy to re-write RSS for it to be delivered in a different way, and this is indeed what we are doing for the research degrees prospectus. However, RSS is a standard, and so we cannot really change it for the whole site. Just because someone wants their RSS feeds delivered like this, does that mean the next person will? But, I return to my original question of this post: exactly how usefel are standard RSS feeds for research repository content? Although “recently added” probably has a use, I think “recently published” has more.

Having just completed my latest monthly report on ORO for our PVC for Research, I am compelled to share with you the recent trend in full-text content on ORO (click on thumbnail to enlarge):

Hopefully, this is a reflection of our message about the importance of Open Access filtering through to our academic community here at the OU, as well as perhaps a few myths about copyright having been dispelled. The rise in the median weekly level of full-text deposits from the second quarter of 2008 coincides with the start of our present advocacy campaign, which is very encouraging to see.

Despite the clear advantage of broadening access to research, some academics are still concerned about depositing Accepted Manuscript versions of their research output in their institutional repository. I’ve written about this in the past on this blog, including highlighting other ways in which academics can look to embrace Open Access (i.e. through publishing in Open Access journals, or by looking to retain copyright).

Central to this issue is the worry that, for someone coming across a paper in an institutional repository, it may not be immediately obvious exactly what version of the paper is being viewed, especially if that paper is downloaded and becomes divorced from the repository itself. So, to help allay this concern, we have now established a coversheet system for ORO full text articles. For an example, open the PDF of this article deposited in ORO.

As you will see, not only does the coversheet make it clear that this is the Accepted Manuscript version of the paper, it also provides information on how to cite the paper and who the copyright holder is – two other very important elements. Not only that, but the coversheet also provides a bit of OU/ORO “branding”, which again is very significant should the article be downloaded and thus separated from the system.

The coversheets are generated “on-the-fly”, so we can change their content or design at any point in the future without having to physically edit every single item on ORO. We would just go in and edit the master template and then each coversheet would regenerate next time it is opened. For this reason, we have noticed that (occasionally) the PDF needs refreshing once opened before the coversheet appears. We think this is a glitch with the PDF conversion software and will continue to look into the problem. However, this issue should naturally phase out with time, as once a coversheet has been generated for the first time, it is then saved.

As with all new ORO developments, we welcome your feedback… but we are quietly confident this will be appreciated among ORO users!